Waiting For Aggressors To Be `Satisfied' Is Likely To Be A Long, Deadly Wait

April 22, 1994|By PAT TRULY Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Sometimes I can't-bleeping-believe what I hear otherwise intelligent people saying.

This week I was watching one of those Sunday morning press-and-newsmaker discussions of weighty issues when Sen. John V. McCain, R-Ariz., said of the screwy Bosnian situation, "We have to hope the Serbs have enough of Bosnia to be satisfied ...'' That sounds like he is saying (although McCain surely would disagree with this analysis if he has had time to mull over his language and put a better spin on it) that the rest of the world, being impotent, should merely close its eyes until an aggressor or a murderer or whatever has had his fill.

Just hurry up about it. Peace in our time and all that.

On the other hand, in the McCain view, it would be all right to lift the arms embargo and thus make it easier for the Muslim-Croatian government of Bosnia to get heavy weapons - artillery, rockets, perhaps tanks and anti-tank weapons - with which to better defend itself and its people (many of whom are at risk in cities designated as "safe havens" by a feel-good United Nations) from the Serbian onslaught that already has cost upward of 200,000 lives and has included many atrocities of the sort usually found in wars about land and religion.

Bring religion into an argument and the innocent start dying, wholesale.

But none of that is McCain's fault. Furthermore, McCain is right about lifting the embargo and right to be worried about the safety of U.N. troops in Bosnia - the optimistically named "peacekeepers."Indeed, they are being killed from time to time.

McCain also doesn't want to risk American lives over there in Bosnia. He spent several years as a prisoner in Vietnam, a victim and hero of the last war we got into without the proper understanding of what was happening. But although that has left him with a unique perspective upon such adventures, it also may have warped his view of history.

Have those who talk appeasement never heard of Neville Chamberlain? Of the lessons that we came out of World War II swearing never to repeat?

The issue in Bosnia should not be how to satisfy Serbian appetites with the least inconvenience for the rest of us. The issue should be how to stop the Serbs from getting "all of Bosnia they want," because much of what they want will be taken by force from others.

This is not an appetite we should have any interest in satisfying. Achieving peace by letting an aggressor have his way was tried in the 1930s, and it failed. Aggressors' appetites are whetted by the weakness of peace-at-any-price peoples, not dulled by it. By the time poor Chamberlain learned that lesson, his own England was being bombed and innocent Czechs and Poles were being lined up and shot in their own villages.

In the 1930s, Benito Mussolini's appetite was unopposed in Ethiopia. The free world allowed the Spaniards to fight their civil war - the best parallel to Bosnia - to the last drop of the last Spanish republican's blood. Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, dispassionately watched all this and commented in his diary about how far England had fallen since the days of Sir Francis Drake. "These are the tired sons of a long line of rich men," he wrote, "and they will soon lose their empire."

We can only guess at what Ciano would say about us today. And we don't know what would-be Hitler or Stalin is watching events in the Balkans. Whatever his name, he must see a promising future indeed.